The present invention relates to the field of enterprise information and planning and more particularly to a method, a system and a computer program product for managing information within an enterprise.
Enterprises today are burgeoning in terms of the number of people employed, the number of departments, and geographic locations. Along with the growth of enterprises, there is a corresponding increase in the amount of information generated within the enterprise. The sources of information are varied in terms of their geographic location and the type of information generated. This variety makes management of information a time consuming and costly task.
The task of managing information includes consolidation of data within documents, storing the data, retrieving the stored data for analysis and representing the retrieved data through a user interface. Sales reports, budgets, requests for proposals and feedback are a few examples of information within an enterprise. Sales reports are obtained from different sales offices, various departments within the enterprise provide their budgets or capital requirements, vendors send requests for proposals (RFP) to order products, and feedback is obtained from customers.
The information obtained from the different sources is used in planning activities by the executives of the enterprise. For example, sales reports and RFP are used to plan production volumes within a manufacturing enterprise. Feedback from customers is utilized in planning new products and improving the existing products. Further, the information provided by the sources may be in various forms. Examples of the forms include e-mails, website forms, and data files such as spreadsheets.
Various sources periodically provide information. Therefore, management of information is not a one-time process. Often, the management of information has to be done on demand, i.e., as and when the information is provided. For example, vendors send RFP as and when they require products. Production volumes, which are dependent on these RFP, need to be updated accordingly.
Various problems can arise while managing information due to the variety of sources and the periodic availability of new information. These problems include a lack of data integrity and security, difficulty in consolidation, and the non-availability of historical data. To ensure data integrity, information that depends on new data values has to be updated accordingly. For example, if new RFP are obtained in a manufacturing enterprise, the planned production volumes that depend on these RFP must be updated accordingly. Data from the various sources must be consolidated in a single place. For example, the data is obtained from e-mails and data files. To reduce the time in consolidation, the data must be automatically extracted from e-mails and data files and then stored. Security must be ensured while managing the information. For example, the executives of an enterprise should have access to information regarding all the departments within the enterprise, but a customer should not have access to this information. Further, in order to use the information for planning, historical information must also be available. This is useful, for example, in identifying trends in data values. Historical data may also be useful if a rollback is required, which involves returning data to previous values. This may be important if, for example, it is found that invalid data was received from a source. Hence, the information must be versioned or chronicled so that data of a particular time or state can be accessed later.
A system for managing information in an enterprise is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 20030177135, titled “Multi-user Database for Computer-based Information”, filed on Apr. 11, 2003 and assigned to Axon Information Technology Pty. Ltd. The system comprises a multi-user database that stores information as a plurality of data elements. Data files are imported and analyzed to extract the data elements. Data files are analyzed and the data elements are extracted. Amendments to the data elements may be made directly, or by exporting parts of the multi-user database as data files, making changes to the exported data files, and then re-importing the amended data files. Information can be used by structuring the information according to the requirement of a user.
Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,653, titled “System for Reconstructing Prior Versions of Indexes Using Records Indicating Changes between Successive Versions of the Indexes”, filed on Jun. 28, 1991 and assigned to Digital Equipment Corporation MA describes a method and a system for versioning information objects in a database. The latest versions of information objects are stored in a complete form. Prior versions are saved only as delta changes, which are the changes that take place between the prior versions and the latest version. In this way, prior versions can be recreated from the latest versions.
However, the systems mentioned above do not provide a complete solution for managing information within an enterprise, while addressing all the problems mentioned before. Hence, there exists a need for a method and a system for managing information within an enterprise that allows viewing, comparing and reverting to historical data. The system should allow information to be viewed in a manner, which is useful to the executives of an enterprise. It should also allow the executives to compare current information with previous information and analyze trends. Further, the system should also allow reversion to a previous state. Finally, it should also address the problems arising due to lack of data integrity and security, and difficulty in consolidation.